SUMMARY
WHEN I SAY FRAMEWORK I DON’T MEAN A SIMPLE ENGINE
BIG HOLISTIC FRAMEWORKS LIKE MDA HAVE NOT BEEN HELPFUL TO ME
RATHER I MEAN SMALL USUALLY AD HOC WAYS OF STRUCTURING DESIGN THOUGHT
Words are traitorous bastards
One of the big eye opening moments I had upon moving from my first studio (where I was for about 9 years) to another studio was how much vocabulary I assumed was just common design vocabulary absolutely did not carry over. It was small things, like an “earflick” (the Riot term for a small, ultimately inconsequential annoyance in game design that still turned a player off from the game if it happened often enough), but also big things like the word “framework”.
It isn’t so much that other studios had a different word; more often than not, they just didn’t have a word for it at all, or couldn’t even see the utility of having a word for this thing.
So because I’m talking about frameworks a lot, I want to quickly lay out what I don’t mean by that word.
Frameworks aren’t simple engines
Or rather, the word framework (if you google framework + game design) is clearly being used to mean this (the google AI definition today was “In game design, a framework is a set of libraries and tools that provide a structure for developing games.” This is what we call “not even wrong”. Game design isn’t about libraries and tools. That’s engineering. Whole different specialization.) So to clear this up: no, I don’t mean a set of libraries and tools to help you make a game. I generally use the word engine for this and don’t necessarily see the use of differentiating between, say, Unreal and PyGame. Guess you could call the latter a framework, but I won’t.
I am not interested in a game design Theory of Everything
There are frameworks that take a bird’s eye view of game design and try to describe all there is in one big coherent theory. That sounds like a nice hobby, and much like collecting stamps it’s a neat way to spend your time and basically not harmful as long as you don’t keep talking to other people about it.
As far as helping you think about making games goes I don’t find these very useful, and to be fair to the authors, I’m not sure that was the main purpose. I met Robin and Marc briefly while I worked at Riot and they struck me as crazy smart designers who could run circles around me, so this isn’t me going “MDA BAD! ME SMART!”. By all means, read the paper! It’s short and very easy to understand.
But when you’re trying to decide if your platformer should have a double-jump or not, or if your MOBA character’s ability should be unit-targeted or freely targeted, these extremely high level abstractions aren’t going to help you.
There is no such thing as a video game
The final bit to point out here is that, especially with big frameworks, treating the whole of video games as though we could use the same tools on all sub-types is a bit silly. League of Legends has more in common with soccer than it does with This War of Mine. It’s tempting to try to elegantly sum up all of video games, and the designer’s brain especially is primed to want this kind of elegance, but we must reject elegance where it doesn’t serve our goals, and if our goal is to get better at making the game we’re working on, I don’t think MDA or 8 kinds of fun is going to take an awfully long way. They’re more like table stakes; you should probably understand these lenses and remind yourself from time to time that rules aren’t aesthetics, but as concrete problem solving tools, these things don’t help a lot.
There’s infinite sub-varieties of video games, and even within a single given game you will end up applying a ton of different frameworks, often to the same problem and the same question, depending on what you’re trying to do.
The Unknown Unknowns
Loathe as though I might be to quote a war criminal, there’s things you know you know, things you know you don’t know, and things you don’t know you don’t know. (I guess there’s also things you don’t know you know, to complete the symmetry?)
And I am starting to think that a lot of people who teach game design don’t know that they don’t know about frameworks. That’s bad! That’s where almost all of the unique skill of game designers resides. Everyone can open Unity and drop a damage value from 30 to 25, but it’s much harder to know why you’re doing what you’re doing. Anyway, that’s the kind of framework I am writing about here.